Russian Society Has Outgrown the System
Although Vladimir Putin has returned to Kremlin as a president, he will be a president of a different country than he was in 2004 or Dmitry Medvedev was in 2008. During the election campaign Putin was constantly asked how come in the last 12 years he hadn’t managed to fix all the issues that he was promising to fix in 2012 and after. Putin’s answer was that in his 8 years as a president and 4 more as a prime minister the leadership of the country had different priorities. Theoretically that is a good answer - it is the leadership’s responsibility to prioritize, however whether it can prioritize the right way or not is determined by the voters. Hence the question is - how do the current priorities and leadership’s agenda reflect the real problems that Russia is facing today. The answer to this question will determine whether Putin’s next presidential term will be a success or a failure. In my personal opinion there is a number of extremely troubling issues in Russia that demand immediate attention.
One of them is the rapidly increasing contrast between the social maturity of Russian public and the current political system. Russian society is starting to resemble a post modernist society more and more - Russians are quickly becoming a part of the global community, leaving the “sovok” mindset behind and losing the traditional unquestionable fear of the authority. Young and middle aged members of Russian society are among the first ones in Russia who, while retaining specific national features, manage to combine it with the system of values and traditions of their peers from well developed countries. However the political system that the Russian government is offering them today is strictly pre-modernist. It’s becoming more apparent by the day that this system only operates to serve its own interests and is incapable of satisfying political vision of people outside of the government machine.
It’s not even the question of personal opinion about Putin or Medvedev. Today Russian society positions itself more and more as a legal or political group opposed in some way or another to the authority and officials. Society denies the government’s right to have interests other than those of the public, which contradicts the reality. On May 17 during a speech in St.Petersburgh Dmitry Medvedev stated that good legislation is a smart balance between the interests of the public and the government. Especially considering that the interests of an individual were not mentioned by him at all, such definition goes hand in hand only with the principles of a non-democratic state.
The point that people can’t be trusted with electing their own leaders since they will inevitably elect criminals and populists is not only non-impressive in today’s Russia but also insults the actual voters.
The second issue is related to economy. The myth that post-soviet Russians need to learn hard in order to understand the intricacies of the modern market is false. A huge number of Russians has not only created their own companies and businesses in the West but also managed to pose serious competition to the locals, who grew up in the open-market environment. What this brings us to is that when it comes to business - it’s not the people it’s the environment and conditions that these people have to work under. No national business in the country is capable of being a functional part of the competitive global market, if its worth in Russia is defined only by how much it costs to take it over. The business community has long outgrown the economic system in Russia. The lack of the proper laws defending the right of private property as well as lack of rule of law, combined with unspeakable systematic corruption and unlawful practices of the officials , turns any holder of private property in Russia into a political vassal.
Today Russia is a state of neo-feudalism, which instead of serving the national business, uses it for its own interests.
The third issue is the administrative structure of the country, which had been built a long time ago to serve a socialistic state and which almost hasn’t changed since. In today’s Russia there is hardly any logic in the way the state is separated into regions, and same can be said about the principles defining the 6 types of Federation’s subjects, about the numerous national subjects that have their own constitutions creating administrative and ethnical borders within the country. At the same time the recent takeover of a significant part of Moscovskaya Oblast by Moscow only shows the impromptu nature of the regional borders in the country.
The current administrative system in Russia not only demands a huge amount of high-costing officials to run it, but also presumes vertical-only control over the country, which was the original method used in the USSR. Eltzin’s attempts to remove verticality while keeping the existing administrative order only lead to complete chaos, which was only overcome by Putin’s restoration of this verticality. Thus Soviet legacy of the administrative structure is a major obstacle on the way of democratic reforms that prevents a “flat” system of control that can serve the public from being created. The existence of the Soviet administrative system makes the verticality of authority a must, thus increasing the conflict between the growing maturity of Russian public and impotent political system, which can’t satisfy the demands of this developed society. In the end the conflict might reach such a scale that fixing it by the means of political evolution might be either too difficult or simply too late.
Published in “Vedomosti” on May 25, 2012
Translated by Gennady Gladkov
Read in Russian: http://n-zlobin.livejournal.com/71052.html#cutid1